Still Alive

No worries - if anyone was worried - Noah's Ravens is still alive. I hope I'll be able to have a large, art-heavy post/series of posts up in the next week or two.

Thanks for your patience.

-M

Roll Up For the Roadshow

On Saturday, I participated in the kickoff of the Cambridge Science Festival in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Myself and one of the other student employees at the Beneski were asked to help run a booth showing fossils collected from western Massachusetts. The booth was organised by a group called the Jurassic Roadshow, who collect fossils and educate people about our geologic past, often at events such as this one; they kindly invited Beneski Museum docents to get involved with the event.

Jurassic Roadshow fossil fish.
[photo by the author]

Day of the Diplodocids

Welcome, true believers, to a Very Special installment of Noah's Ravens. As you have no doubt seen while scrolling through Facebook or Twitter or while idly surfing the web, yesterday marked the appearance of a new (very long) paper reviewing the diplodocid sauropods, 'A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)' by Emanuel Tschopp, Octávio Mateus, and Roger B J Benson, published open-access in PeerJ. Although I'm certain you've all had time to read it, pore lovingly over the cladograms, savour each and every word about each and every specimen, and completely lose yourself in the figures depicting small chunks of bone, I thought it might be nice to have a brief(ish) round-up post that covers some of the big ideas of the paper in a condensed(ish), hopefully-easy(ish) read.

It was nice knowing you, Diplodocus longus, but all good things
must come to an end. Read on to find out why. Legs belonging to
The Sauropod Formerly Known As Diplodocus longus at centre.
[photograph by the author]

Smiley Smilodon

...Meow? [photo by the author]

If there is one animal that could be considered the living (or, ah, once-living) emblem of the Ice Age, that animal is undoubtedly the woolly mammoth. But second place is nothing to sneeze at, and second place is firmly defended by a pair of 20-centimetre-long canine teeth. Yes, in the popular imagination, the second-most iconic animal of the Ice Age is the ferocious sabretooth tiger.

It's rather shame that there's not really such a creature as a sabretooth tiger.

Frederic Loomis Discovers Everything, Episode 1: Raiders of the Lost Continent

Around three million years ago, South America became connected to North America via the Isthmus of Panama, and an event called the Great American Biotic Interchange took place, where wildlife from South America moved north and vice versa. Prior to this, South America had been isolated from most of the rest of the world since the Cretaceous Period, and connected only to Antarctica until they separated about 30 million years ago, allowing little exchange of wildlife from other places in world. As such, South America was a 'lost continent,' a strange land cut off almost completely from the rest of the world, with its own array of unique organisms, the characters in their own isolated evolutionary story. It was into this strange world that the North American emigrants came some three million years ago, and it was into the fossil echoes of this world that a very different group of North Americans came in the early 20th century.

Some Patagonian fossils from the Cenozoic Era. They include notoungulates (top row
and left middle row) such as the sheep-sized digger Mesotherium (top centre), superficially
elephantine astrapotheres (lower jaw of Parastrapotherium, middle right), and the extant
xenarthrans (bottom row), including the flattened armour of an armadillo.
[photograph by the author]

Happy World Pangolin Day!

It's 21 February 2015 and you know what that means: World Pangolin Day!

And I bet you thought I was joking when I mentioned more than one natural history-themed date in February...

Chinese pangolin Manis pentadactyla at the Leipzig Zoo. 
[image in the public domain]

Happy Darwin Day!

It's 12 February 2015, and that means it's Darwin Day - everyone's favourite natural history-themed date in February - and this year we're celebrating 206 years since the great naturalist and founder of modern evolutionary science was born in 1809.

Charles Darwin, c 1878. [image in the public domain]